RE: RPG IV and CF-spec "keep it IBM" -- RPG400-L

Bob,

>If tech savvy managers are not moving to RPG IV because 
>they don't have programmers who will be able to maintain 
>it (as suggested in several other posts) how will adding yet 
>another flavor (the CF-spec) enhance the manager's 
>willingness to use RPG IV? I believe it will not. 

Oh, I agree completely.  Most probably those shops are stuck with RPG II
forever.  Programmers sprinkling a few SELEC statements into the code won't
magically create new (modern) logic out of 20 year old code, that's for
sure.  In reality, these shops haven't even moved to RPG III yet!  Witness
the pitifully small number of sites that understand and use shared ODPs for
performance enhancement.

>It will have the opposite effect, hence my dislike of 
>introducing the CF-spec today. Perhaps after a few 
>years of RPG IV code, if people want to go the 
>'RPG V' route, then sure, go ahead, but in today's 
>world, CF-spec will kill RPG IV.

That's an interesting thought, and one worth pondering.  The way I was
looking at it, RPG III didn't kill RPG II, and certainly the introduction of
RPG IV was a yawn: RPG III is alive and well.  I was thinking that the
statistics show that only advanced shops have adopted RPG IV, and so why not
cater to them?

If I follow your thoughts properly (no guarantee!) you are saying that the
"little guys" are finally starting to adopt RPG IV and if we make it too
strange, they'll abandon it as being just too foreign.

Interesting thought indeed!

>But, hey I only speak from talking to thousands and 
>thousands of RPG programmers, not a few dozen 
>respondents from this mailing list (as IBM apparently 
>does).

Heh!  I've been fascinated at some of the differences between the main list
posters and my life as an isolated grunt.  I spent 17 years working for a
place that never once sent me to an IBM tech conference, nor to COMMON, nor
to a user's group.  We subscribed to News/38, and openly criticised the
articles for being too "ivory tower."  In such an isolated environment, it's
easy to fool yourself into believing that your code is supposed to look like
"that", and that white messages are just a way of life, and perhaps most
importantly, it's easy to believe that you really aren't smart enough to do
much better.

In my opinion, the major posters here are an order of magnitude or more
beyond the little guys.  I still think of myself as one of those little
guys, even though I now work for a software development house instead of a
company where programming (and programmers) is a necessary evil.  Way too
many of my cohorts come from a similar background as I did.  It is
incredibly difficult to sell RPG IV even to my fellow grunts here in the
trenches.  Why is that?  

I disregard the management mantra ("nobody can maintain it") as a crock.
Management has no idea what maintainable code is, or they'd have stepped in
a long time ago with firm standards for RPG II or RPG III.  I think that WE
in the trenches think we're not smart enough to maintain RPG IV and that's
why the adoption rate is so abysmal.  In light of that, your opposition to
CF-specs is even more interesting to think about.

For those reading this who are waffling about using RPG IV, who think that
it's too hard to "learn a new language", who find the new terminology weird
and disconcerting, I have one very convincing argument:  I write in RPG IV
and love it.  I started in 1978 in RPG II on the System/3.  I am fluent in
matching record, stacker select, sort specs and 80-80 lists. I learnt to
program by reading the S/3 RPG II reference manuals and looking at compiler
listings in the filing cabinet.  I am a high school graduate (dropped out of
college before my first semester finished.)  I am a musician by temperament
(classically trained viola.)  I had a miserable score on my math SAT and a
great one on my English.  I have absolutely no formal computer training
whatsoever.  By all respectable measurements, I should probably not be a
programmer at all.  If *I* can do it, literally anyone can.  Anyone.  Try
it.  You'll like it!

Buck Calabro
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